Continuing through October 13, 2013
Longtime collaborators Marne Lucas and Jacob Pander return to a visual motif they have used before — infrared cinematography — in a striking and disturbing art film entitled "Incident Energy." Different scenes and backdrops are projected on multiple walls in Disjecta’s side gallery, accompanied by an eerie ambient soundtrack. The film’s loose narrative charts an archetypal man and woman’s journey from youth to death, making symbolic pit stops for courtship, jealousy, sex, childbirth, and disillusionment.
Lucas and Pander shot footage in Portland, as well as the Oregon coast and the Mt. Hood National Forest, filming in all four seasons to correspond with the seasons of human life. A final scene shot at a sylvan lake in the dead of winter is particularly harrowing, as the unnamed male character, presumably decrepit and widowed, meanders alone through deep snow, as if confused by dementia. The infrared photography imparts surreal effects, portraying cold objects as black, warm ones as white. Although the acting occasionally veers into melodrama, this is in keeping with the abstracted storyline and unconventional medium.
